Irrelevance opens minds

Associate Professor Alistair Rolls is at the forefront of what many may consider 'irrelevance' and he is proud of it.

He is a leading expert on Twentieth and
Twenty-First Century French Literature, the principal English-speaking
scholar on the immortalized French writer Boris Vian and is paving the way forward in
the field he calls Fetishism Criticism, a discourse which recognizes that two
opposing narratives can co-exist while actually refuting each other.

"I believe deeplythat in order to grow and expand as
individuals – to access something precious – we need to do irrelevant things,"
Rolls says.

"My academic
research on literature and poignant literary figures allows for just that. It
encourages everyone, not just the academic community, but also a wider
audience, to take a text, engage with the words, interact with the message and
ultimately form a relationship with the book."

"Now I ask: Have you changed in anyway?
Have you grown? What ideas have been ignited?" Rolls says.

He takes this concept one step further
and poses this: "If you can read a piece of work, digest it and never change
your thoughts, then it doesn't matter what you read, it will have no impact."

Rolls proclaims that this is the power
of literature. "It's what you - the reader – actually do with the book that
matters and it all begins with irrelevance."

Rolls recalls how pure serendipity
played a key part in launching his love affair with the often misunderstood
genius known as Vian; the focus of his PhD and countless academic publications
that followed. "I was working in a French high school in Bordeaux as an
assistant when a fellow teacher gave me several of Vian's books. I began
reading his works and didn't have a clue where to start. He posed a challenge
unlike other authors I was well acquainted with. I couldn't box him or define him;
so instead, I proposed an alternative way to understand him. A series of different
lenses, including fetishism and intertextuality which shone a light on his
literary brilliance."

Vian remains one of the most well-known
popular culture characters in French history, but is disproportionately
under-valued alongside other leading French figures of the time, Rolls argues.
"Vian had an extraordinary breadth of talent. He was a writer of books, poems, short stories, plays and
songs and was also an accomplished jazz musician, mathematician and engineer by
trade. Yet, he remains frustratingly misunderstood
because he is considered a jack-of-all trades and master of none."

Reflecting on the highlights
of his career thus far, Rolls says "I was extremely privileged to join an
expert panel of three at the Sorbonne in 2007 and to deliver a keynote speech
at the first major Vian academic conference. This was the most flattering
honour. Then, in 2010, I was listed in the bibliography of the first collected
works of the author, which was a significant acknowledgement of my contribution
to understanding the artistic talents of Vian and his influence on our culture."

Rolls is an ideas person and
is always exploring new ways and mediums to challenge the norm, provoke new
thought and expand creatively.

"My new fascination is crime fiction,
and in my book Paris and the Fetish: Primal
Crime Scenes, which is due out early 2014, I explore reasonable and radical
re-reads of various texts through fetishism. In the Freudian understanding of
Fetishism this basically means we know something not to be true but believe it
to be true at the same time," Rolls says.

He will also be collaborating with
several colleagues from the University of Newcastle from the English and Classics
disciplines on the production of articles focusing on various authors.

"This is a unique opportunity to take a
new approach - an innovative perspective - and do something irrelevant, but likewise,
so very relevant to our personal growth and the intellectual development of our
society."

The Dead Heart is American author Douglas Kennedy's first novel. It was first translated into French in 1997 as Cul-de-sac. It was this translation that made Kennedy a household n... [more]

The Dead Heart is American author Douglas Kennedy's first novel. It was first translated into French in 1997 as Cul-de-sac. It was this translation that made Kennedy a household name in France and that gave The Dead Heart its identity as a roman noir. In the space of just 20 years the novel has been translated twice into French and adapted twice more, as a film and now as a graphic novel. Elsewhere, we have analyzed this trajectory from the perspective of retranslation and the ostensible differences between the two translation Skopoi, and the use of paratextual branding to target specific reading publics. Focusing on the graphic novel allows us here to go beyond the problematics of translation and to broaden the scope of our study of textual adaptation. It also allows us to reassess the originality of the source text.

This article takes as its point of departure a fetishistic scene from the 2004 ITV television adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library in order to demonstrate (1) h... [more]

This article takes as its point of departure a fetishistic scene from the 2004 ITV television adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library in order to demonstrate (1) how fetishism itself is a form of adaptation and thus how adaptation functions fetishistically; (2) how the fetishism diaplayed in the 2004 adaptation of the The Body in the Library reflexively references a more primal fetishism at work in the original text; and (3) how the body in The Body in the Library functions as a screen memory to disavow (both veil and reference) a primal, and otherwise purloined, body. Finally, it is argued that the diegesis proper of The Body in the Library is itself a screen memory, or adaptation, designed to mask the original, transgressive desire of Dolly Bantry.

In this article, a text, in this case an Australian crime novel, is analyzed in terms of its translatability. The framework adopted here is influenced by deconstructionism, and es... [more]

In this article, a text, in this case an Australian crime novel, is analyzed in terms of its translatability. The framework adopted here is influenced by deconstructionism, and especially intertextuality, and as such translatability is taken as an inherent tendency of a text to extend beyond its own formal limits and to map itself onto a virtual, foreign version of itself. This mechanics will be shown to be reflected in the structure of Barry Maitland's second novel, The Malcontenta, especially in its exaggerated thickening of liminal spaces and reflexive staging of intertextuality. By comparing Benjamin's call for translation, or a text's translatability, to Genette's call of the epigraph, we consider how Maitland's referencing of a particular intertext oscillates between regimes that, again after Genette, can be considered autographic or allographic. Lastly, a re-reading of the denouement of Maitland's text will be offered - predicated on the frenchness, and specifically not the Frenchness, of a particular set of doors.

Rolls AC, 'What does it mean? Contemplating Rita and desiring dead bodies in two short stories by Raymond Carver', Literature & Aesthetics: The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics, 18 88-106 (2008) [C1]

2008

Rolls AC, Vuaille-Barcan M-LJ, 'How relevant is relevance? Weighing the relative value of relevance and situatedness against disciplinary integrity in the teaching of French in Australian universities', The International Journal of Learning, 15 55-62 (2008) [C1]

Research Supervision

Current Supervision

The Return of the 1920sStudies In Human Society N.E.C, Faculty of Education and ArtsCo-Supervisor

2011

Figures of the Literary Hoax : The Vernon Sullivan CaseLanguage and Literature, Faculty of Education and ArtsPrincipal Supervisor

2011

Watermark: a Liminal Approach to Autobiographical Short FictionLiterature, Faculty of Education and ArtsCo-Supervisor

Past Supervision

Year

Research Title / Program / Supervisor Type

2015

Living Like Common PeopleLiterature, Faculty of Education and ArtsCo-Supervisor

2014

Georges Simenon and the Terrain Vague: Indirect Representations of WarLanguage and Literature, Faculty of Education and ArtsPrincipal Supervisor

2014

The Use of Multi-Dimensional Compensation Strategies from Functionalist and Artistic Translation Perspectives - The Contemporary Australian Novel Stepper by Brian Castro: A Case StudyLanguage and Literature, Faculty of Education and ArtsPrincipal Supervisor

2014

Marguerite Yourcenar: A Quest for Ataraxia; a Locus Amoenus Hindered by Absence and PresenceStudies In Human Society, Faculty of Education and ArtsCo-Supervisor

2014

BORIS VIAN: (non) CONFORMIST. The Translation of Two Collections of Short Stories in a Theoretical ContextLanguage and Literature, Faculty of Education and ArtsPrincipal Supervisor

Pleasures of the Text: Readings in Contemporary French FictionLanguage and Literature, Faculty of Education and ArtsPrincipal Supervisor

2010

The Gothic Meets the Weird: A Critical Analysis of Charlie Cheesegrater: A Weird Tale and Its InfluencesLiterature, Faculty of Education and ArtsPrincipal Supervisor

2010

OutsidersLiterature, Faculty of Education and ArtsSole Supervisor

2009

State and Church Involvement in Aboriginal Reserves, Missions and Stations in New South Wales, 1900 -1975 and a translation into
French of John Ramsland, Custodians of the Soil. A History of Aboriginal-European Relationships in the Manning Valley of New South Wales. Taree: Greater Taree City Council, 2001Indigenous Studies, Faculty of Education and ArtsCo-Supervisor

2008

Marriages, Microscopes and Missions: Three Women in Postwar AustraliaLiterature, Faculty of Education and ArtsCo-Supervisor

2007

In Search of Mother: Jungian Reading of Selected Works of Tanizaki Jun'IchiroLanguage and Literature, Faculty of Education and ArtsCo-Supervisor